Friday, June 22, 2012

Resizable windows in Ubuntu

By default, Ubuntu ships with window resizers that are very small and difficult to hit exactly with the mouse. This is made worse by the fact the resize cursor jumps to a different location. You can fix this by switching to the High Contrast theme. This adds a visible resizer to some windows. It does make the rest of the UI look terrible, but that's a price I'm willing to pay to be able to resize my terminals.

2 comments:

Will Roberts
said...

If you're using Compiz you can enable some other resize methods which I've found to be much easier to use than trying to grab the edge of a window (they may even be on by default).

In my Compiz config (on Debian) I have a section called 'Window Management' and in that section a plugin called 'Resize Window'. You can configure a mouse binding to initiate resize just by clicking in the window with a modifier key. So just like how ALT + Left Mouse Button lets you move Windows you can do ALT + Middle Mouse Button to resize them.

The same error GNOME 3.0 had. In recent versions (3.4) they added a non visible offset that does the trick, the visual border is thin but you there is space for the resize handles to work. The ALT trick mentioned by Will Roberts is what I use, even on GNOME 3 (ALT + drag is enabled by default)